One must permit his people the freedom to seek added work and greater responsibility. In my organization, there are no formal job descriptions or organizational charts. Responsibilities are defined in a general way, so that people are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do as they think best and to go to anyone and anywhere for help. Each person then is limited only by his own ability.1
No matter how capable, deserved, or well entrenched a particular leader, another claimant is always waiting just offstage, impatient for a moment in the spotlight. It would be gracious to say the man or woman in the wings ascribes to a different vision. But most often they just have a soul-wrenching need for their own fifteen minutes of recognition, a deep desire to prove the great pitcher Catfish Hunter’s sage observation correct: “The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”
To stay in power, leaders need to be effective and also possess the necessary skills to shape and carry each of the important issues. Equally, they must never ignore the instincts that brought them to the top of the boil. I do not know how many engagements Admiral Rickover lost. My supposition is they were few and far between. However, I was present one time when his desires were definitely not observed.
Context is important. This episode happened near the tail end of the Vietnam War—a particularly difficult time for the Navy and our nation. Public support for the war was plummeting. That was the external environment.
Out in the fleet, the Navy was experiencing mini race riots on some of the carriers and was in the process of recognizing it had an organizational alcohol problem. In Washington the Navy portion of the Pentagon and Congress were locked in an acrimonious public debate about how much of the surface Navy should be nuclear powered (nuclear power plants were more capable than petroleum-based ones but also more expensive). Since money is always both constrained and fungible, for many this was simply an argument over whether there should be more or fewer ships.
Elmo Zumwalt, the youngest Chief of Naval Operations in U.S. history, had been appointed to lead the Navy. Many thought he had been selected because of the racial problems in the service (the Navy was still effectively segregated), material failures (the surface fleet had not been replaced or revitalized following hard service in three wars—World War II, Korea, and Vietnam), and the dismal morale caused by senior naval leaders with mores and attitudes toward junior personnel more appropriate to the previous century.
Armed with immense self-confidence, Zumwalt quickly made many changes. Like most disturbances to the status quo, his “Z-grams” were in general despised by the conservative Navy leadership (no matter how much the same modifications were admired by many younger officers and enlisted personnel). Two of his most important cultural changes involved desegregating the Navy and introducing women on board Navy ships and aircraft. Demonstrating his multidimensional capabilities, after he had retired, Zumwalt would run (unsuccessfully) as a Democrat to represent Virginia in the U.S. Senate and subsequently become the president of the American Medical Building Corporation.
The Secretary of the Navy (and Marine Corps) was John Warner, then married to Elizabeth Taylor—the same Ms. Taylor who was probably the most famous movie star of her age. Secretary Warner would subsequently become Senator Warner from Virginia and eventually chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He was a Republican and not personally enamored with Admiral Zumwalt, who returned this sentiment. It was the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and larger-than-life personalities in the Navy. It was a superb time to be in our nation’s capital, and I was fortunate enough to have a ticket to a seat in the wings on stage left.2 I had gotten there essentially by winning the lottery.
My particular sweepstakes day began one early morning in a dry dock floating in the Thames River near New London, Connecticut. A few unusually large ships in the U.S. Navy serve their lives as floating dry docks. Those I was familiar with were constructed by welding large steel-plate Us together until a length sufficient to handle the largest submarine was formed. Then a bow was riveted to one end. At the opposite end two large gates powerful enough to swing wide open, yet be watertight when shut, completed the ship.
Dry docks are designed to be flooded far enough down in a river or bay for the submarine to be brought over the sill by a combination of thick hawsers and precisely maneuvered tugs. If you haven’t done this, trust me, it is a very dicey evolution in any sort of wind or tide. The ship is slowly pulled into the dock until the submarine is precisely positioned atop newly cut spruce timber caps, which will gently crush as they absorb the submarine’s weight, thus compensating for minor hull imperfections. At this point the dry-dock gates are hauled shut, the lights flicker, and the immense dry-dock pumps begin spewing acres of water over the side. The dry dock and the submarine inside begin their perceptible ascent from the brine. Within a few hours after the submarine has entered dry dock, repair work begins on areas of the boat that often haven’t been accessible for months or perhaps even years. The frantic work pace is accompanied by the putrid smell of the millions of dying organisms that attached themselves below the waterline while the ship was floating.
At one period in my life, I spent more than my share of time in dry dock. I did so not by choice but because of three things: a fact, a tradition, and an observation. The fact was that USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, had twin screws. This was not unusual. Most diesel submarines had two propellers. Our problem was the odd placement of the screws. To squeeze our destroyer-escort engine room into a diesel-submarine hull, our propulsion shafts had been angled out a bit from the centerline. As a result, the outside arc of the screw blades extended a few inches beyond the widest girth of our ship. Consequently, the tips of each blade were the first part of the ship to make contact if we were not terribly careful as we approached a pier.
In addition, because the angled shafts produced a disproportionately small effective rotational moment arm, even with a powerful nuclear reactor we could not get nearly the stationary rotational power a normal diesel boat generated. Unfortunately, tradition demanded that two-screwed ships, as Nautilus surely was, not deign to use tugs to assist them in berthing or getting under way.3 Using tugs had been considered a social sin among diesel submariners, and that bias accompanied them to the nuclear ships.
And finally, the observation: My commanding officer at that time was the most challenged ship handler with whom I ever served. This was not entirely his fault. He apparently had an undetected severe medical condition—an enlarged hubris. He thought he understood relative motion better than God. Consequently, our moving steel vessel more than kissed many stationary objects.
Because all three conditions (bad design, unthinking diesel practice carryover, and excessive hubris) coexisted on Nautilus’ bridge, I became experienced with dry docks. To replace inexplicably (at least to our commanding officer) battered screws, we entered these large steel beasts on multiple occasions. But that particular night I lay underneath the three thousand tons of steel that was Nautilus, back braced against one of the enormous wooden keel blocks, my submarine sweater and ugly green foul-weather coat only partially shielding me from the cold, not because of another dinged screw. I was there, for the fourth time in the last year, trying to figure out why some very large valves wouldn’t operate properly.
I had been engineer officer on board Nautilus for three full years. I had solved a number of long-standing problems. We no longer averaged a fire a day and two reactor scrams a week. I had done well enough that in the morning I was flying to Washington, D.C., as one of the three finalists for the position of first fellow to the Chief of Naval Operations. Thus, I had only two more hours (if I intended to take a shower—and the smell of the dying shellfish clinging to my skin probably made this a necessity) to determine how to make the main circulating water valves close without excessive torque, something I had never seen them do before.
It was nearly three in the morning, and I had been out of ideas for hours, if not months. I had told everyone else to hit the rack at midnight. I was simply being stubborn now. All that remained in the dry dock was me, an eight-cell flashlight, half a pack of Pall Malls, and my pride. I shifted my butt atop a nest of crushed shells. The prick of the shells and the putrid smell (I still can’t eat mussels) were the only things that had kept me awake the last two hours because after the early sundown the New England temperature had plunged well below freezing.
When Nautilus was at sea, tons of water a second coursed through the main circulating pipes to cool the steam produced by the nuclear reactor. These pipes were the most egregious flooding threat in the ship. The submarine Thresher had perished a few years earlier from a problem with a much smaller pipe. To compensate for this danger, these sixteen-inch-wide pipes were guarded by huge valves designed to be closed, even against the entire pressure of the ocean deep, within seconds. These very valves had been pulled from the ship and now lay on the smelly shells before me. I certainly did not want to leave the ship in this condition, but the officer who was to relieve me (Dick Fast) had already reported on board, and only a few hours were left before my flight to Washington, D.C. I was down to simply taunting myself.
I idly played the beam of the flashlight on the nearest valve. The large metal shape lay on its side in the dry dock a couple of feet from me, the shadows of the dock lighting interplaying with the beam from my flashlight. I lit another cigarette from the butt of the one I was smoking and flicked the old one at the valve in disgust. It hit in a flash of sparks. Instead of dropping among the inflammable debris of the broken shells, it fell into a valve crevice.
I wearily got to my feet to fish the butt out. As my index and middle fingers felt for the cigarette, they rubbed against the operating piston shank, and I realized there was something embossed on the shaft. I traced the discontinuity, trying to visualize what I was feeling. I could swear it was two small letters. My flashlight was no help, so I wet my fingers and rubbed again. It felt very much like an R and an H. I closed my weary eyes, and when I opened them, I was looking back at the large stern gates of the dry dock. Was it possible? Maybe.
I moved over to the starboard side to check the two valves that lay on the deck there. Using my penknife to scrape away the verdigris, I quickly also found raised letters on that shank. These I could see: “LH.”
After climbing the six levels of ladders up from the floor of the dry dock, I woke the four men of the M-Gang, sending them down into the dock to reassemble the circulating water valves and test them. Before I took a shower and changed into my service dress blues, I checked Machinery History, which at that period contained a record of every evolution performed with a ship’s equipment since the ship’s keel had been laid. In a couple of minutes, I found a pertinent penciled ten-year-old entry: “Removed, cleaned and replaced the main circ water valves, K. R. McKee.”
I took a quick shower as Linda, my wife and also my ride to the airport, was already waiting at the head of the pier. Before boarding the airplane I called back to the ship. The valves had already been swapped to the opposite sides (right hand [RH] / left hand [LH]—we were not very sophisticated in those days and had a ways to go on part interchangeability), greased, and reinstalled in the ship. They were now opening and shutting with less than 10 percent of the dry torque previously required. It looked as if an ancient problem had been solved.
I slept the entire thirty-minute shuttle across the Long Island Sound and, after changing planes in New York City, on the ninety-minute flight to Washington.
In the interview process to become the Navy’s first Chief of Naval Operations fellow, I believe I finished third out of three candidates. I certainly didn’t finish first. I may have slipped to second when Admiral Zumwalt, the first uniformed four-star admiral I ever met, poured me a cup of coffee, handed it to me, and said, “How is Linda?” I only looked at him quizzically. After an uncomfortable silence, he continued, “Linda, your wife?”
Instead of coolly replying, “Fine, and how is Mouza?”4 I reflexively jerked and tipped my coffee on the wide gold stripes covering his sleeves from his cuffs nearly to his elbows.
Although that meeting was admittedly a bit uneven, it was not the worst interview I had that day. Three hours earlier I had taken a cab from National Airport for my very first visit to the Pentagon. We were in our seventh year of war in Vietnam. Nixon was president, and Watergate was looming. The antiwar and antiestablishment movement was in full bloom. Uniformed men had been known to have blood or paint thrown on them as they came to and from work. As a result, everyone working at the Pentagon, except the most senior officers (those assigned their own cars and drivers), wore civilian clothes, except on Wednesdays (a halfhearted effort to ensure everyone in Washington still owned a uniform) or on days they went to Capitol Hill to testify. That Monday, when I walked into a poorly lit Pentagon office for a preinterview, it was impossible for me to tell if I was meeting a civilian or an officer. Since the first individual with whom I met was wearing a suit, I assumed he was a civilian.
As I started to sit down across from him, I noticed his name, printed on a cheap plastic laminate plate and slid into a wooden triangular holder on his desk: K. R. McKee. Instead of continuing the slide down into my seat, I reared up and stepped back, my voice rising a bit: “Are you the K. R. McKee who was on board Nautilus in 1961? The one who was unable to get the main circ water valves installed back on the correct sides?” Perhaps the previous evening, as well as the stress of several years of trying to fix this exasperating situation, was still fresh on my mind.
Yes, even upon reflection years later, I think that half hour with Capt. Kin McKee, Admiral Zumwalt’s personal friend and perhaps his most trusted adviser, was by far the low point of that particular day. A few months later McKee became an admiral himself, and he eventually became the next Admiral Rickover, when Rickover himself retired—so perhaps I could have better chosen someone with whom to pick a fight my first day in Washington.5
However, that evening, while I was dejectedly waiting to board my plane to return to Connecticut, the Bureau of Personnel had me paged at the airport. Kin was looking for a submarine officer for his own staff. As a result, while I spectacularly failed the interview to be the Navy’s first fellow,6 I was soon busy performing special projects for Kin McKee and his friend and boss, Admiral Zumwalt. For two years my responsibilities involved tasks such as smuggling arms to Israel (a skirting of the law that I assume is long past the appropriate statute of limitations), recommending mining Hanoi Harbor to change the course in Vietnam, developing the first submarine cruise missile (more successful than the mining), and coordinating with the State Department. Most of these bits and pieces are beyond the range of this book, but what is definitely within scope is my frequent service as the communication path between the two Navy giants of the day: Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. and Adm. Hyman G. Rickover.
I thought they were both extraordinary. The Navy was fortunate to have these two visionary leaders, for just as Admiral Rickover could see well into the future, Admiral Zumwalt had an equivalent gift. Each was innovative and ingenious and drove cultural change but went about accomplishing his goals much differently, in a manner best suited to his own personality and the time he had available. Rickover built an organization that could develop the necessary cultural change over decades. He worked many details himself. He was an introvert and did not enjoy charming large audiences. In contrast, Zumwalt inherited a Navy that badly needed immediate and dramatic transformation, and he had only four years to accomplish this change. He also understood why he had been selected over nearly a hundred of his seniors to become the youngest Chief of Naval Operations in history. He was a public charmer and burned with an energy that threatened to outshine the sun.7
Surrounded by fellow admirals and political leaders who (to be charitable) thought everything was just fine, Admiral Zumwalt believed that the Navy of the early seventies was racist and unnecessarily elitist. He was convinced that the service needed a cultural change. Effecting this change was not an easy job, for Zumwalt was not leading a band of admirers. Many in Congress and certainly a large number of Navy officers did not see any reason to alter the current course. Zumwalt realized, however, that not only was the Navy’s existing position morally bankrupt, but the service would not survive if it remained unable to attract black, Hispanic, and female recruits—and it wasn’t going to do it with its disgraceful reputation. Correctly identifying recruiting of minorities as his most important priority, Admiral Zumwalt turned his attention away from the management of the naval aspects of the Vietnam War (a task he handed to Kin McKee) and began with a bang the efforts to force change.8
Reflecting the larger Navy’s antipathy, Zumwalt’s successors reversed many of his alterations soon after he had retired. Nevertheless, the mere spark of an unsuccessful revolution is often sufficient to breed other revolutionaries, and Zumwalt broke some ancient glass that could not be replaced, no matter how hard fools later tried. The course of our Navy was inevitably altered for the better as a result of Admiral Zumwalt’s stewardship. But as the classic writers remind us, our heroes are not always perfect, and one of my heroes—Admiral Zumwalt—had a visceral negative reaction to another of mine—Admiral Rickover.9 Displaying exceptional judgment, Kin McKee wisely stood back from the line of fire and left me to carry volleys from the Pentagon (where Admiral Zumwalt held sway) to Crystal City (Admiral Rickover’s den), three miles away.
Contrary to public opinion at the time, in the several exchanges I personally witnessed, Admiral Rickover was professional and courteous in his public and private demeanor with Admiral Zumwalt. My observation, however, was definitely not the majority view in Washington at the time. Admiral Zumwalt was good looking and charming, and politically he was much more connected than the cantankerous Rickover. Zumwalt was a Vietnam War hero to the public and Congress. He was also the anointed Navy leader, and he certainly understood how to work a crowd. Zumwalt hit the long ball in the sphere of public relations. Like other leaders of his style, he had an ego that demanded the entire Navy stage. He was not interested in ceding even a back corner to Rickover.
Rickover could not keep pace with Zumwalt. I don’t think he could have even if he had had an equivalently large staff. While often in the news, Admiral Rickover made his appearances in civilian clothes and often in a lecturing mode—not quite the same as capturing converts with sparkling blue eyes and a uniform adorned with broad gold stripes and shiny medals. Rickover didn’t do sparkling, and his own Time cover was sixteen years old.10
In some Washington political arenas, it wasn’t substance that counted, but style, and in addition to having great substance, Zumwalt was the king of style. He captured the press and rather enjoyed turning the media against Rickover. It may not have been “fair,” but personal characteristics grease many a path, and Zumwalt was much more charming than his opponent. Thus, Zumwalt carried the public relations day. As one of Rickover’s critics (rather grudgingly) later said, “As a prime exponent of the ‘never explain, never complain’ school of leadership . . . Rickover projected a more arrogant and arbitrary image than he probably deserved.”11 In the Washington arena Rickover and Zumwalt were galvanizing figures. Most officers chose to ally themselves with one or the other. From my great vantage point, I admired them both.
A few months after I arrived in Washington, the decision was made to build the Trident (formerly the Underwater Launched Missile System [ULMS]12) submarine. This submarine would be a remarkable step forward. It would be invulnerable. It would carry much-longer-range missiles with maneuverable reentry warheads. Each could reach Soviet targets from as far away as U.S. ports (thus simultaneously increasing U.S. security and possibly making the Air Force Minuteman fields redundant—there is nothing like a little interservice rivalry). The initial base to support these ships would be built on the Pacific coast near Bangor, Washington. In the final Navy decision meeting in the Pentagon with Secretary John Warner, Admiral Zumwalt supported going ahead as planned, but as we adjourned the meeting, the admiral crooked his finger at Kin McKee.
Shortly thereafter, I received a call to report to McKee’s office in Rosslyn. He slid a copy of the briefing slides over to my side of the table. “Take a billion dollars out of the Trident program,” he said. A billion dollars was a lot of money then (equivalent to about $5 billion today) and was about a quarter of the cost of the entire program just presented and supposedly approved. I hadn’t even had a chance to sit down. It didn’t appear that we were ever going to finish our discussion about the Nautilus’ main circulating water valve placement.
McKee provided his typically terse guidance: “The CNO [Chief of Naval Operations, that is, Admiral Zumwalt] agrees we need Tridents, but he still wants money for his new surface ships.”13 A single sheet of paper slid across McKee’s desk and nudged the briefing slides. “That should get you in the door.” The paper was on the Chief of Naval Operations’ personal letterhead and simply stated, “Provide LCDR Oliver whatever assistance he requests.” Across the bottom the signature was scrawled: “E. R. Zumwalt.”
So, I went around Crystal City knocking on doors and making friends with various submarine admirals who had the mistaken impression their program was already approved at the highest levels. They did not appear overjoyed to find a young officer, armed only with a rather creased note from the Chief of Naval Operations (I should have put it in an envelope instead of my breast pocket), asking to examine everything they had already considered in the design of the ship, reactor plant, missile, and base. Some reacted rather harshly. For example, when I entered the Navy’s Special Projects Office, which had, against all odds, managed the building of the Navy’s Polaris underwater missiles and which would be responsible for the Trident missiles, a captain whose name I do not recall pinned me up against the reception area wall with his forearm against my throat and described his rather intimate relationship with my mother. I do remember there was an admiral behind him nodding his own firm agreement with everything being screamed in my ear. I also recall deciding I would have to work this issue a bit more delicately. And I recollect that Admiral Rickover calmly instructed his (visibly snarling) staff to fully cooperate with my review before he turned his attention to other matters.
After I had submitted my recommendations to McKee, I next saw my report with the billion dollars in suggested decrements when it had the blue-inked words “Approved, E. R. Zumwalt” scrawled across the cover page.14 Neither Admiral Rickover nor anyone from his office ever offered a word of complaint about this decision. Overall resource allocation was within the bailiwick of the Chief of Naval Operations, and Rickover had no intention of rising to the bait of questioning what Caesar’s was to decide. I suspect Rickover was the only person in Washington not holding his breath, waiting for the clash. Rickover conserved his energy and focused on the goal of building a sufficient number of attack submarines.
But Rickover’s public acquiescence was not sufficient for Zumwalt. The Chief of Naval Operations’ antipathy for Rickover was both personal and professional. Since submarines were the primary Cold War thrust against the Soviet Union and their building rate was supported by the president, Zumwalt couldn’t mount a direct assault on the submarine building rate. He confined himself to more indirect thrusts, as the following story illustrates:
In the development of nuclear submarines, the nuclear power plant had provided much more underwater speed for submarines, and just as it is for an aircraft platform, speed is life for submarines. However, to go fast—and to avoid the noise from cavitation (air bubbles forming and collapsing as the moving screw blade tips create localized low-pressure areas and collapsing bubbles)—the submarine needs to be able to go deep enough so that the water pressure suppresses cavitation. The limiting depth is driven by the strength of steel in the hull. From diesel boats to present-day boats, the submarine hull has continuously evolved. The steel needs to have many characteristics but, in particular, must be ductile and tough (to absorb depth-charge shock). Equally important, the hull steel needs to be able to be formed and welded into place by individuals who often are not working in the most pristine of conditions.
Submarine hulls have a sordid history of cracks that develop over time. These cracks are caused by stresses that were sealed into the steel when the shipyard welding conditions or process were not exactly right. In some cases new machines had to be developed to avoid the problem. In others the steel being welded had to be held at a particular elevated temperature. Over the years we learned a great deal about working with esoteric steels through trial and error. By the time Admiral Zumwalt became Chief of Naval Operations, submarines had proceeded from high-tensile-strength steel (Nautilus) to HY-80 (George Washington Carver), and many people were advocating using the much stronger HY-130. The new steel would definitely provide better safety margins. The question was whether it would also bring the same sort of welding challenges we had initially faced with HY-80. Most experts believed the answer was yes.
To avoid excessive development costs and to test the new steel on a smaller scale than in an actual submarine, Rickover had advocated building the NR-2, a small nuclear-powered underwater research vessel (a predecessor, NR-1, was already in operation) with a hull made out of HY-130. Naval Reactors believed that building the NR-2 would help to work out all the welding bugs before the Navy committed to an expensive launch of a new class of submarines. The NR-2 was included in the shipbuilding budget Congress was in the process of reviewing in 1973.
About this time Admiral Rickover had his second heart attack. He was being cared for on the ninth floor of Bethesda Naval Hospital. The Sunday evening after the attack, Admiral Zumwalt and his senior aide, Don Pringle, visited Rickover. As later related to me by Pringle, when the Chief of Naval Operations walked into his room, Admiral Rickover rolled out of bed and began pulling various catheters from his arms.
“What are you doing, Rick? Get back in bed!” Zumwalt exclaimed.
“If you are here, you have figured out a way to screw the submarine force. You only came to make sure I was really dying. I need to get up.”
Zumwalt and the nurse eventually convinced Rickover to get back into bed. The Chief of Naval Operations spent thirty minutes in the room, in one of the longest conversations he ever had with Rickover, sitting in a chair he pulled up to the bed.
I heard about this discussion later that evening when Don Pringle called me from Admiral Zumwalt’s car, on its way down Wisconsin Avenue from the hospital:15 “Dave, Admiral Rickover really is going to be in the hospital for at least a couple of weeks. The CNO wants you to go over to the Hill tomorrow and kill the NR-2.”
Admiral Rickover had great instincts, as all elephants must have, but he was weak from his heart attack. The NR-2 was never funded by Congress.16
The following year I was back working full time in the submarine force. If Rickover knew or suspected that I had assisted his very public enemy (Zumwalt), who was now retired from the Navy (and thus relatively powerless), in cancelling the NR-2, he never mentioned it. In fact, a few years later he bent one of his most sacred rules to keep me eligible for promotion to admiral.
The Navy is supposedly an autocratic organization. Yet both Rickover and Zumwalt were senior leaders who deliberately and forcefully instituted cultural change in the Navy. Rickover completely succeeded. Zumwalt made progress.17 Is it possible to compare and contrast the different methods that Admiral Zumwalt and Admiral Rickover used to institute cultural change? What methods were effective? Why? Why not? Could either admiral have benefited from one or more of the other’s techniques?
Admiral Rickover did not retire for another nine years after the incident with NR-2. By that time he was eighty-two. When he did retire, many of his admirers believed he had stayed beyond his best years.18 Should his political loss to Admiral Zumwalt over the (non)building of the research submarine have indicated to Rickover that it was time to seek a more physically vigorous man for the job of defending Navy nuclear safety? Do you think Rickover resisted this path simply because Zumwalt was one of his strongest critics? How do leaders recognize when their moment to depart is drawing nigh?